and experimenting with agricultural
technology. I want to travel and experience as much of the world as I can.
I want to eat well, sleep enough, exercise, and enjoy downtime and the simple, fulfilling, everyday things.

Throughout my career I’ve looked
for jobs or work that would align with
these goals. I’ve worked for startups,
governments, multinational corporations, small businesses, social enterprises, and as a freelancer. I’ve tested
myself in different roles and brands,
and I rarely took a position where I
didn’t believe in the “higher something” the organization or brand was
trying to achieve.

At each organization, I found a distinction between work and personal
life that collided with how I wanted to
live my life. Business was always encouraged to take precedence over personal lives, and balancing the two was
the responsibility of the individual.

The closest I came to incorporatingmy life goals and principles was whenI worked with a social enterprise. Thesocial enterprise was an online and of-Needless to say, due to incorrect as-sumptions about my target audiencesize and uptake, as well as numerousrookie mistakes—like not properlymanaging inventory levels—within afew years the business was in troubleand I was under tremendous financialstrain. This only added to the amountof strain on my marriage at the time,which eventually fell apart. After mydivorce, it took me years of reflection,experimentation, and picking up thepieces of my life before I could start de-signing again.

The big lesson for me was a business plan shouldn’t simply be a cold,
calculated financial statement. While
many people start with a lot of energy and work long hours, fewer plan
how to motivate themselves when
depressed, uninspired, and juggling
bills. Upon starting a business, you
experience emotional highs and lows
for months to years as you try to stabilize things. Much like a marathon,
the inner game of maintaining hope,
motivation, and confidence becomes
excruciatingly important.

My current approach has a much
stronger emphasis on my personal
beliefs such as the importance of environmental monitoring, having clear,
measurable goals, and de-emphasizing profit as a key metric in exchange
for things like lifestyle, travel, and family. My business is now an expression of
my beliefs, opinions, and values.

JACINTA: I hesitated a very long
time before starting my own business,
mainly because I believed the goal of a
business was to make money and grow
as large as it could. I didn’t want to
spend my life working toward this.

In the business world, the metrics
for success are viewed in economic
terms, like profit, growth, market
value, and so on. Working toward
such goals doesn’t fit into the kind of
life I want.

I want a life where I have the time,
focus, and energy to spend with loved
ones; to pursue my curiosity; to learn
and develop new skills; and to work on
non-business related projects that are
important to me like growing food,
collating soil and temperature data,